The Rocking Horse Winner Sexuality
Death and Sexuality in D.H Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) has been described as bewildering, controversial, outrageous and “radically out of sync with his culture”. As Anne Fernihough states in the introduction to “The Cambridge Companion to D.H. Lawrence”, “[Lawrence’s prose] is intellectually and emotionally demanding ,its unevenness, its tendency to repetition and excess, its sometimes outrageous flouting of aesthetic norms...are notorious. And as shall be observed, these conflicting paradigms emerge within his short stories as well, to the point where the publisher of ”Smile” (1926) was uncertain about the collection it should be placed in. His short stories become a ground of emotions and actions at odds with themselves , hinting at hysteria in one moment while slipping on the mask of the proper in another. His outrageous flouting of aesthetics manifests itself in this statement by Lawrence in one of his letters to Edward Garnett, where he claims that
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“cruelty is a form of perverted sex”. I
The above mentioned statement becomes supremely important while evaluating one of his short stories, The Prussian Officer (1914) published in the collection “The Prussian Officer and other Short Stories”(1926). The story revolves around the curious relationship between an officer and his orderly, which can be interpreted in various ways, but the sexual politics of the story dominates the majority of it. It is interesting to note how sexual roles are constantly interwoven and exchanged between the two. The dichotomies of sterility and virility, passivity and inertness as opposed to vigour and activity, boldness and reticence, continually flit between the officer and his orderly. In “D.H Lawrence”, Ronald R. Draper says that in “The Prussian Officer” , “Lawrence displays a violent perversion of natural vitality”. The officer is an aristocrat. The orderly a peasant. The Prussian officer’s blue cold eyes are contrasted with the warm, lively ones of the orderly and in the beginning, the officer is described as, or is “Old”, while in the end the young soldier “...was gone, looking old, and walking heavily.”The sexual violence has resulted in the youth being sapped from the orderly while at the same time the “fierceness” has returned to the officer’s blue eyes. Power appears directly proportional to sexual domination. The orderly is hapless, the officer triumphant. This sadism on part of the officer can also be viewed as the officer’s envy of the youth’s fine vitality. It irritates him that , while he remains sterile and cold in his life’s twilight, there are still pertinent young men possessed with the virility of the young and unthinking. Another constant conflict that is made apparent is that between the “ thinking” officer and the “instinctive” orderly. And this instinct is linked with a brutish, primal force in the orderly. There is of course the whole racial spin to this issue (orderly is swarthy with stocky limbs) as well. There is animal imagery linked with the orderly in the officer’s mind. “Sureness of movement by an unhampered, young animal”. Yet paradoxically it is the officer who exercises brute force against the orderly, who acts like a savage and derives pleasure out of the sadistic act. There is a hint of shame accompanying the act, but the deep pleasure and its effect stay with him, while the “shame” is systematically erased by drinking. This “deep pleasure” is contrasted with the “mockery of pleasure” felt by him in the company of a woman after the incident. Even the binaries of old age and passion seem to coexist in the Prussian officer later. “The cold eyes” now “dance” while the young man is “shut off, unmoving” and more importantly, “inert”. Inert is a word that is constantly repeated throughout the story to convey the vulnerable shell that the orderly has become. The kind of sexual tension emphasised in the story, apart from having obvious homo-erotic suppressions, also points to the final disintegration caused by this unequivocal and insecure assertion of power. For, insecurity certainly forms a huge part of the officer, It is mentioned that the Prussian Officer had been a gambler, and hence remained an infantry officer. The frustration of being unable to rectify this leads him to clutch at straws to prove his masculinity, and indeed, the only reason that the crescendo builds is because he is angry at once again possessing emotions that he is unable to control. An “event” or a series of developments again lies outside the gambit of his immediate control and he resents this fact. During the latter part of the story, the” pleasure” belongs to the orderly when he manages to “control” his source of trouble. The orderly is horrified yes, but mostly pleased. And not only simply relieved to get rid of his pursuer, but savagely, brutally “pleased”. It seems that for a moment in time, he is transformed into the Prussian officer when this pleasure overtakes him, and also when he mounts the officer’s horse, which could stand for the orderly releasing his own sexuality. The scuffle between the orderly and the officer is full of sexual innuendo. In describing their struggle, it reads like a description of the sexual act, [“ And in a second the orderly, with serious, earnest young face, and underlip between his teeth, had got his knee in the officer 's chest and was pressing the chin backward over the farther edge of the tree-stump, pressing, with all his heart behind in a passion of relief, the tension of his wrists exquisite with relief... He did not relax one hair 's breadth, but, all the force of all his blood exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man... Yet it pleased him, too, to repress them. It pleased him to keep his hands pressing back the chin, to feel the chest of the other man yield in expiration to the weight of his strong, young knees, to feel the hard twitchings of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame, which was pressed down on it”.]As can be made out, there is heavy eroticisation, however it leads not to climax but to death. This can of course be seen as a final outburst of the contained sexual passion that has been perturbing both the people, and the “little death”” that is the orgasm. The climax of the “act” turns anticlimactic in a sense. The “act”, death and existence of the orderly is tied to that of the officer. For, “when the officer lay sprawled there inert, his life also ended there”. Death has been portrayed as searing, unbearable yet unconsciously beautiful. It has been described in precise detail, the vague yet very earthy moments between his “thirst” and “death” acquiring an unreal quality as if of waking dreams. The reader is left unsure of whether one has transgressed into the unfamiliar grounds of death or if one is still very much alive. The animals are also now docile, mischievous yet harmless like birds and squirrels. But, the orderly is scared of these creatures , he seems to become aware of their eyes upon him. He feels the squirrel (animal) peeping at him, the aggressiveness is absent but the fear remains. However, this fear is secondary, he is primarily “amused” by the display of squirrels chasing each other . It is perhaps the amusement of the outsider, of no longer being the chased himself that grants him the ability to view them with an amused glance. It is distance that gives him relief, and pleasure in the form of amusement. II T.S Eliot complained of Lawrence that Lawrence had “an incapacity for what he ordinary calls thinking” (Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence ,pg 7). These contraries , dismissals haunt Lawrence’s fiction and it only takes a cursory reading of his short stories to come round to this opinion. It takes a deeper meaning to realize the thread of consistency running through the stories and comprehend his intellectual mode. He works with extreme emotions and hence the vocabulary is never mild, always climactic and seldom indifferent. It would be fear, pathos, upsurge off passion, extraordinary stillness and transfixion with Lawrence, so that there seems movement in passive moments. Similarly, Death also becomes a lived, felt and pulsating experience rather than a single, shattering event. It engulfs the narrative where the dead weight reminds you of its density. There is death in life and there is life in death. For instance, in Smile (1926),Matthew, the protagonist( for want of a better word) seems to be experiencing the death of his wife Ophelia. Almost as a “death by proxy”, inverting the existentialist refrain by Samuel Beckett of “existence by proxy”. Even, in this scenario, death and life are interchangeable . Matthew goes through Inferno, a reference to Dante’s Hell, a place of absolute fire and of absolute ice. To quote from the text (Smile), “Two elderly Englishwomen opposite him had had died long ago, perhaps even before he had”, he is referring to two different kinds of deaths. The resounding death of monotonous life, where one lives through the motions of life, slowly withering away and awaiting final, literal death, which despite the build up and fear ascribed to it, is frankly mundane and quite an ordinary event. The other is the death experienced, the living, emotional pain of the blow of death felt when your centre of existence, your meaning, ceases to exist and escapes from one world of nothingness into another. Then, there is the third death, the literal death of the “body”, end of one’s material existence, the one which ironically is felt the least and hurts only for one moment in the history of time. This fleeting incident plunges another soul into a more unfeeling and morbid black death. Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate mention ”his preoccupation with the ‘queer dark corners’ of life and the ‘cruder and more instinctive side of humanity’” (Lawrence’s Tales, Pg.106). It comes to fore in that laughter to which he surrenders in “Smile “ . The setting is his wife’s corpse. But his seriousness has evaporated to give way to laughter. This can be seen as a slipping away of the mask of rationality, of realizing the absurdity of the situation and finding that “to reason” in such a circumstance would itself paradoxically be an act of irrationality and futility. Critics have alternately seen this as a moment of Freudian hysteria. Matthew’s desperate refrain of “Mea Culpa” occurs during the point where he wants to restore order from the chaotic laughter of the moment past. It is a cry to escape the laughter that has been let loose and been taken up, almost like a contagious virus, by the nuns. The sense of propriety is being willed to return to him. As Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate suggest in “Lawrence’s Tales”(pg.106), “...we are ...left with, however,...an unsettling quality which arises...because [a] line [is ] crossed from laughter to death”. It becomes interesting to note that this transgression works in elasticity, almost like a band that snaps back to its previous un-stretched self. This is explained by the fact that we are greeted with the news of death, introduced to laughter and end with a notion of being “utterly smileless”. This transgression occurs not only in dealing with death, but also in the contained sexuality that rises in proportionality to the build up to laughter. The reader is edged out of a comfortably smug seat onto an uneasy, hard terrain when Matthew is described as being mesmerised by the nuns, their movements, their fluttering of the skirts, “...still aware of the soft, fine voluminousness of the woman’s black skirts, moving with soft, fluttered haste in front of him”. The description is of a woman, and Lawrence seems to be lulling the reader into forgetting their religious associations. They smile, laugh as women would, forgetting their place with him in the moment and he desires them as he would an ordinary woman. Of course the situation is further complicated by the presence of his dead wife’s body. A corpse, now devoid of vitality and sexuality. She is “pretty” while the nuns are “voluptuous”, the heat of life , as it is. The moment is a frenzy, with sexual currents running amuck. The nuns are not treated as severe, frowning practitioners of a religious faith but as women of flesh and blood, who are desirable , mischievous even and who can laugh with little gumption. They “fall “ with him in that moment of disarray and try and bring back their sense of morality as he grapples with his own erased sense of reason. But the inversion is very much present. This can be seen as a parody of the “seriousness” of religion and at the same time, a fearful and escapist engagement with the same. This is illustrated by these lines,”’poor little thing!weep, then, poor little thing!’ But the chuckle was still there, under the emotion.” A little further from these lines, “...clutching the black beads, but the noiseless smile was immovable” . The irony ofcourse is that no one is weeping, not even the corpse. The impertinent smile has cemented its space on the nuns’ mouths and while they clutch at their religious paraphernalia and will tears, the smile remains and belies these tries. Lawrence is laughing at the enforced religion as he is laughing at the enforced reality. But, there is Matthew’s fear of the women, for at the time that the order reappears, his sexual desire fades away and an all pervading fear of religion (represented by the nuns) overtakes him. In the end, the voluptuousness morphs into a man utterly “smileless”. A taboo is torn apart and experienced, revelled in but replaced in a snap by the conscious reality. About the conscious and unconscious in Lawrence, Fiona Becket writes tellingly that there is a refusal in Lawrence “to polarise the conscious and the unconscious. For Freud, the two states are in opposition: that which is unconscious may become conscious...Lawrence has an investment in bringing the two ‘realms’ much closer...”(Lawrence and psychoanalysis, Pg221). This is characterized by the slight curl at the dead woman’s mouth, “And for the first time, they saw the faint ironical curl at the corners of Ophelia’s mouth”. Is it an instance of death mocking those who worry about it? Or is it perhaps the unconscious self being mirrored wickedly for those, with striking horror, who indulged in the laughter? A somewhat Dorian Grey-esque image? Early on, for Matthew, the nuns “were like a mirror”, now Ophelia seems to have taken up that role and is almost taunting them to lay bare their instinctive selves. But all they have left now is wonder. A fluttering, expected and inconsequential wonder that stems from their conscious reality. This unconscious reality being projected scares them and they cover her with a veil, so that the paradox is buried, albeit without resolution, and the lapse is laid to rest. III “The Rocking Horse Winner” ( 1926) has been grouped along with works of Lawrence that tend towards he supernatural, like “Glad Ghosts”(1926).
And indeed,”The Rocking Horse Winner” seems to ascend the realm of the fantastic. It can however be judged independent of its supernatural element. The setting is a well kept house, despite the finances in which the mother is extremely bitter about the lack of money and the impotency of the father to handle such a situation. Paul, the male older child desperately wants to be lucky to be able to please his mother and his rocking horse becomes the instrument through which he derives his luck, or through which Luck is granted him. There is also the narrowness of ideas highlighted in this story. Luck is good because luck is the harbinger of money, and Uncle Oscar can’t help contemplating on the “win” even as the nephew lies newly
dead. In this story can be seen the classic Oedipal Complex, so described by Freud, taking shape. But they remain shades and not the whole truth because a “rival” father figure is almost absent. The frenzy that Paul experiences on the Rocking Horse can be equated to sexual frenzy, in his mind filling the gaping chasm that is his mother’s dissatisfaction. Ironically, he is also in actuality filling the financial need or “greed” of his mother and hence satisfying her but of course it is never enough and he keeps hearing the whisper “ There must be more”. His frenzy can also be viewed in terms of a religious mania, a plea and a prayer, and he is in fact seeking divine intervention in the form of Luck. This reading is further complicated by the fact that Lawrence was very much against the Freudian idea of sexuality being evident from childhood itself. Lawrence firmly believed that sexuality of a child did not develop until puberty. Paul’s age is ambiguous, he could be certainly at the threshold of puberty. But his Mother obsession is apparent and his death is also a circumstance in the vain hope of bringing material satisfaction to his mother. Within the framework of an almost-absent father, the child takes charge of the house financially and has the “luck” that his father lacks. Chaman Nahal in “D.H Lawrence, An Eastern View” is of the opinion that natural flow from mother to child is perverted into an absorbing of life by the mother from the child. This is supported by the fact that the mother at first feels hostility towards her children that her children realize as well. “Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard.” Paul, sensing the distance and clamouring for her notice, tries desperately to win her attention and in the pursuit of that task ends up giving his life for his mother’s satisfaction. Death and Sexuality again become intertwined in the fatality of the tragedy, death is reduced in stature by talks of monetary gain and he dies in a moment of climax. It’s a ruthless use of the child, is transformed into the parent and takes on the burden of bringing in the “filthy lucre“.The metaphorical death of the child figure in the early part of the story can be juxtaposed against the physical death, the final act releasing him, a freedom of sorts .It is a peak reached that has to culminate in death, an end because by natural law, anything that rises to its utmost potential must necessarily decline from that peak. After the crescendo, there is descent, and in this case, sudden descent. IV Graham Hough, in The Dark Sun iterates that “the Peculiarity in Lawrence is that in every case, a claim or an attractive force, a bond exerts itself in flat opposition to the normal sentimental disposition of the characters”. He adds further that “Lawrence professed himself uninterested in character in the conventional self and it is true that many of his personages live in our minds chiefly as depersonalised representatives of certain states of mind”. This can be seen as a projection of Jungian archetypes in his short stories. All his characters do become a mode of expressing certain unconscious elements of the mind. For instance, The Prussian Officer can be seen as exemplifying the Shadow archetype. The shadow is an archetype that consists of the sex and life instincts. The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts and shortcomings. This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness and chaos. People sometimes deny this element of their own psyche and instead project it onto others. Thus the violence of the Prussian Officer may be located in his denial of his instincts. Another archetype that presents itself readily in the short stories reviewed is that of the Persona, in “Smile”. The persona represents all of the different social masks that we wear among different groups and situations. It acts to shield the ego from negative images. The mask of social realities comes undone in “Smile”, and the man finds himself smiling, nudged, as it is, by the wife who is discovered with a “faint ironical curl” herself at the end of the story. It becomes very interesting then, that one of the critics brings in the Bakhtinian theory with respect to Lawrence. According to Con Coreonos and Trudi Tate, “...the Lawrence who thus emerges is merry, subversive and carnivalesque”. They add that” Bataille’s...eroticisation of death is remarkably similar to Lawrence’s own thought. It is a way of becoming divine in the very act of acknowledging the emptiness in all things...”. R. E Pritchard, in D.H Lawrence, Body Of Darkness says that “ The underworld, conventionally associated with darkness, death and demonic spirits was also for him associated with the male being, especially the father...he sought peace in a “male womb”, the death that is serene being and power”. He goes on to say “So Lawrence saw death as ambivalent, like corruption and disintegration, all three essential for rebirth”. This theory of rebirth links up to what Chaman Nahal says of Death in Lawrence, “ Death remains for Lawrence a highly conspicuous symbol of newness.” This idea of rebirth in death is most adroitly expressed in The Rocking Horse Winner’s choice of protagonist, namely, the child. The Child in Jungian Archetype signifies rebirth, salvation, and longing for innocence. Lawrence, in “The Reality of Peace” says that “Death is understood in us, thus we transcend it. Henceforward, actual death is a fulfilling of our own knowledge...we can never destroy death, we can only envelop and contain it and then we are free” In all three cases, nowhere is death mourned in the conventional sense. There has been an undertone of release. In “The Prussian Officer”, the orderly gains freedom from the officer’s relentless persecution of him, in “Smile” she is seen not in pain, but with a smile and in “The Rocking Horse Winner”, he is finally released from his redoubtable “luck”. In A Preface to Lawrence, Gamini Salgado says “ Sexuality and unconscious play a dominant part in the thinking of both Freud and Lawrence, but they mean very different things by “unconscious”. For Freud, the unconscious is utterly selfish and ruthless in its blind desire to satisfy the Pleasure Principle. Its desires are mainly sexual and primitive and are such as the conscious moral or aesthetic sensibility would regard with abhorrence. If the psyche consisted only of the Unconscious, civilisation would have been impossible. It is completely at odds with any societal or moral impulses...For Lawrence, unconscious was a more positive element...[for Lawrence] it became the source of individuality and principle of new creativity”. For Freud, sexuality becomes the chief source of fulfilling the impulses of the unconscious, and this approach for Lawrence was problematic. He was of the opinion that psychoanalysts were responsible for the complete erosion of the moral faculty in man. Thus we see that Lawrence’s ideas on such fraught themes such as death and sexuality were rooted in a conscious movement away, yet paradoxically embedded, in the ideas of psychoanalysts and in their ideas of the unconscious. However, the merit of the short stories in producing a reaction in the audience can be discerned even without the crutches of psychoanalysis. He deals with taboos and questions those that shirk from primal impulses blatantly, coercing us to come out of our preconceived notions of “decent” sexuality and acceptable behaviour at deaths. A realist, his short stories tell the glaring truth even within a supernatural setting. For reality does not function in the comfortable haunts of the privileged sane, the naked truth, it lurks in the disturbed minds of the insane and ironically, those most close to their unconscious selves. Works Cited Stevens, Hugh. “Sex and the Nation: ‘The Prussian Officer’ and Women in Love”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
Coreonos, Con and Tate, Trudi. “Lawrence’s Tales”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
Milne, Drew.” Lawrence and the politics of sexual politics”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
Becket, Fiona. “ Lawrence and psychoanalysis”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001 Bibliography
Books :
1.The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
2. The Complete Short Stories of D.H Lawrence Vol II. 1955
3. The Complete Short Stories of D.H Lawrence Vol III. 1955
4. D.H Lawrence, An Eastern View. Chaman Nahal .1971
5. D.H Lawrence, Body Of Darkness. R.E Pritchard.1971
6. The Visual Imagination of D.H. Lawrence. Keith Alldritt. 1971
7.The Dark Sun. Graham Hough.
8. A Preface To Lawrence. Gamini Salgado
Online Websites :
1. Wikipedia.org
2. JSTOR.ORG
3. Sparknotes.com
4. Scribd
5. Nlist
6. About.com
7. DHLawrence.org
8. The New York Times
9. Abebooks.co.uk
10. Goodreads
Online Articles :
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes
2. http://ia600307.us.archive.org/4/items/psychoanalysisan032594mbp/psychoanalysisan032594mbp.pdf
3. http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/tp/archetypes.htm
4. JSTOR Sewanee Review : The literary Criticism of D.H Lawrence by Rene Wellek
5. Derek Hawthorne on “DH Lawrence on the Unconscious “. Counter-currents.com
6. “The Reality Of Peace” by DH Lawrence
7. “Fantasia and the Unconscious” by DH Lawrence
“cruelty is a form of perverted sex”. I
The above mentioned statement becomes supremely important while evaluating one of his short stories, The Prussian Officer (1914) published in the collection “The Prussian Officer and other Short Stories”(1926). The story revolves around the curious relationship between an officer and his orderly, which can be interpreted in various ways, but the sexual politics of the story dominates the majority of it. It is interesting to note how sexual roles are constantly interwoven and exchanged between the two. The dichotomies of sterility and virility, passivity and inertness as opposed to vigour and activity, boldness and reticence, continually flit between the officer and his orderly. In “D.H Lawrence”, Ronald R. Draper says that in “The Prussian Officer” , “Lawrence displays a violent perversion of natural vitality”. The officer is an aristocrat. The orderly a peasant. The Prussian officer’s blue cold eyes are contrasted with the warm, lively ones of the orderly and in the beginning, the officer is described as, or is “Old”, while in the end the young soldier “...was gone, looking old, and walking heavily.”The sexual violence has resulted in the youth being sapped from the orderly while at the same time the “fierceness” has returned to the officer’s blue eyes. Power appears directly proportional to sexual domination. The orderly is hapless, the officer triumphant. This sadism on part of the officer can also be viewed as the officer’s envy of the youth’s fine vitality. It irritates him that , while he remains sterile and cold in his life’s twilight, there are still pertinent young men possessed with the virility of the young and unthinking. Another constant conflict that is made apparent is that between the “ thinking” officer and the “instinctive” orderly. And this instinct is linked with a brutish, primal force in the orderly. There is of course the whole racial spin to this issue (orderly is swarthy with stocky limbs) as well. There is animal imagery linked with the orderly in the officer’s mind. “Sureness of movement by an unhampered, young animal”. Yet paradoxically it is the officer who exercises brute force against the orderly, who acts like a savage and derives pleasure out of the sadistic act. There is a hint of shame accompanying the act, but the deep pleasure and its effect stay with him, while the “shame” is systematically erased by drinking. This “deep pleasure” is contrasted with the “mockery of pleasure” felt by him in the company of a woman after the incident. Even the binaries of old age and passion seem to coexist in the Prussian officer later. “The cold eyes” now “dance” while the young man is “shut off, unmoving” and more importantly, “inert”. Inert is a word that is constantly repeated throughout the story to convey the vulnerable shell that the orderly has become. The kind of sexual tension emphasised in the story, apart from having obvious homo-erotic suppressions, also points to the final disintegration caused by this unequivocal and insecure assertion of power. For, insecurity certainly forms a huge part of the officer, It is mentioned that the Prussian Officer had been a gambler, and hence remained an infantry officer. The frustration of being unable to rectify this leads him to clutch at straws to prove his masculinity, and indeed, the only reason that the crescendo builds is because he is angry at once again possessing emotions that he is unable to control. An “event” or a series of developments again lies outside the gambit of his immediate control and he resents this fact. During the latter part of the story, the” pleasure” belongs to the orderly when he manages to “control” his source of trouble. The orderly is horrified yes, but mostly pleased. And not only simply relieved to get rid of his pursuer, but savagely, brutally “pleased”. It seems that for a moment in time, he is transformed into the Prussian officer when this pleasure overtakes him, and also when he mounts the officer’s horse, which could stand for the orderly releasing his own sexuality. The scuffle between the orderly and the officer is full of sexual innuendo. In describing their struggle, it reads like a description of the sexual act, [“ And in a second the orderly, with serious, earnest young face, and underlip between his teeth, had got his knee in the officer 's chest and was pressing the chin backward over the farther edge of the tree-stump, pressing, with all his heart behind in a passion of relief, the tension of his wrists exquisite with relief... He did not relax one hair 's breadth, but, all the force of all his blood exulting in his thrust, he shoved back the head of the other man... Yet it pleased him, too, to repress them. It pleased him to keep his hands pressing back the chin, to feel the chest of the other man yield in expiration to the weight of his strong, young knees, to feel the hard twitchings of the prostrate body jerking his own whole frame, which was pressed down on it”.]As can be made out, there is heavy eroticisation, however it leads not to climax but to death. This can of course be seen as a final outburst of the contained sexual passion that has been perturbing both the people, and the “little death”” that is the orgasm. The climax of the “act” turns anticlimactic in a sense. The “act”, death and existence of the orderly is tied to that of the officer. For, “when the officer lay sprawled there inert, his life also ended there”. Death has been portrayed as searing, unbearable yet unconsciously beautiful. It has been described in precise detail, the vague yet very earthy moments between his “thirst” and “death” acquiring an unreal quality as if of waking dreams. The reader is left unsure of whether one has transgressed into the unfamiliar grounds of death or if one is still very much alive. The animals are also now docile, mischievous yet harmless like birds and squirrels. But, the orderly is scared of these creatures , he seems to become aware of their eyes upon him. He feels the squirrel (animal) peeping at him, the aggressiveness is absent but the fear remains. However, this fear is secondary, he is primarily “amused” by the display of squirrels chasing each other . It is perhaps the amusement of the outsider, of no longer being the chased himself that grants him the ability to view them with an amused glance. It is distance that gives him relief, and pleasure in the form of amusement. II T.S Eliot complained of Lawrence that Lawrence had “an incapacity for what he ordinary calls thinking” (Introduction, The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence ,pg 7). These contraries , dismissals haunt Lawrence’s fiction and it only takes a cursory reading of his short stories to come round to this opinion. It takes a deeper meaning to realize the thread of consistency running through the stories and comprehend his intellectual mode. He works with extreme emotions and hence the vocabulary is never mild, always climactic and seldom indifferent. It would be fear, pathos, upsurge off passion, extraordinary stillness and transfixion with Lawrence, so that there seems movement in passive moments. Similarly, Death also becomes a lived, felt and pulsating experience rather than a single, shattering event. It engulfs the narrative where the dead weight reminds you of its density. There is death in life and there is life in death. For instance, in Smile (1926),Matthew, the protagonist( for want of a better word) seems to be experiencing the death of his wife Ophelia. Almost as a “death by proxy”, inverting the existentialist refrain by Samuel Beckett of “existence by proxy”. Even, in this scenario, death and life are interchangeable . Matthew goes through Inferno, a reference to Dante’s Hell, a place of absolute fire and of absolute ice. To quote from the text (Smile), “Two elderly Englishwomen opposite him had had died long ago, perhaps even before he had”, he is referring to two different kinds of deaths. The resounding death of monotonous life, where one lives through the motions of life, slowly withering away and awaiting final, literal death, which despite the build up and fear ascribed to it, is frankly mundane and quite an ordinary event. The other is the death experienced, the living, emotional pain of the blow of death felt when your centre of existence, your meaning, ceases to exist and escapes from one world of nothingness into another. Then, there is the third death, the literal death of the “body”, end of one’s material existence, the one which ironically is felt the least and hurts only for one moment in the history of time. This fleeting incident plunges another soul into a more unfeeling and morbid black death. Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate mention ”his preoccupation with the ‘queer dark corners’ of life and the ‘cruder and more instinctive side of humanity’” (Lawrence’s Tales, Pg.106). It comes to fore in that laughter to which he surrenders in “Smile “ . The setting is his wife’s corpse. But his seriousness has evaporated to give way to laughter. This can be seen as a slipping away of the mask of rationality, of realizing the absurdity of the situation and finding that “to reason” in such a circumstance would itself paradoxically be an act of irrationality and futility. Critics have alternately seen this as a moment of Freudian hysteria. Matthew’s desperate refrain of “Mea Culpa” occurs during the point where he wants to restore order from the chaotic laughter of the moment past. It is a cry to escape the laughter that has been let loose and been taken up, almost like a contagious virus, by the nuns. The sense of propriety is being willed to return to him. As Con Coroneos and Trudi Tate suggest in “Lawrence’s Tales”(pg.106), “...we are ...left with, however,...an unsettling quality which arises...because [a] line [is ] crossed from laughter to death”. It becomes interesting to note that this transgression works in elasticity, almost like a band that snaps back to its previous un-stretched self. This is explained by the fact that we are greeted with the news of death, introduced to laughter and end with a notion of being “utterly smileless”. This transgression occurs not only in dealing with death, but also in the contained sexuality that rises in proportionality to the build up to laughter. The reader is edged out of a comfortably smug seat onto an uneasy, hard terrain when Matthew is described as being mesmerised by the nuns, their movements, their fluttering of the skirts, “...still aware of the soft, fine voluminousness of the woman’s black skirts, moving with soft, fluttered haste in front of him”. The description is of a woman, and Lawrence seems to be lulling the reader into forgetting their religious associations. They smile, laugh as women would, forgetting their place with him in the moment and he desires them as he would an ordinary woman. Of course the situation is further complicated by the presence of his dead wife’s body. A corpse, now devoid of vitality and sexuality. She is “pretty” while the nuns are “voluptuous”, the heat of life , as it is. The moment is a frenzy, with sexual currents running amuck. The nuns are not treated as severe, frowning practitioners of a religious faith but as women of flesh and blood, who are desirable , mischievous even and who can laugh with little gumption. They “fall “ with him in that moment of disarray and try and bring back their sense of morality as he grapples with his own erased sense of reason. But the inversion is very much present. This can be seen as a parody of the “seriousness” of religion and at the same time, a fearful and escapist engagement with the same. This is illustrated by these lines,”’poor little thing!weep, then, poor little thing!’ But the chuckle was still there, under the emotion.” A little further from these lines, “...clutching the black beads, but the noiseless smile was immovable” . The irony ofcourse is that no one is weeping, not even the corpse. The impertinent smile has cemented its space on the nuns’ mouths and while they clutch at their religious paraphernalia and will tears, the smile remains and belies these tries. Lawrence is laughing at the enforced religion as he is laughing at the enforced reality. But, there is Matthew’s fear of the women, for at the time that the order reappears, his sexual desire fades away and an all pervading fear of religion (represented by the nuns) overtakes him. In the end, the voluptuousness morphs into a man utterly “smileless”. A taboo is torn apart and experienced, revelled in but replaced in a snap by the conscious reality. About the conscious and unconscious in Lawrence, Fiona Becket writes tellingly that there is a refusal in Lawrence “to polarise the conscious and the unconscious. For Freud, the two states are in opposition: that which is unconscious may become conscious...Lawrence has an investment in bringing the two ‘realms’ much closer...”(Lawrence and psychoanalysis, Pg221). This is characterized by the slight curl at the dead woman’s mouth, “And for the first time, they saw the faint ironical curl at the corners of Ophelia’s mouth”. Is it an instance of death mocking those who worry about it? Or is it perhaps the unconscious self being mirrored wickedly for those, with striking horror, who indulged in the laughter? A somewhat Dorian Grey-esque image? Early on, for Matthew, the nuns “were like a mirror”, now Ophelia seems to have taken up that role and is almost taunting them to lay bare their instinctive selves. But all they have left now is wonder. A fluttering, expected and inconsequential wonder that stems from their conscious reality. This unconscious reality being projected scares them and they cover her with a veil, so that the paradox is buried, albeit without resolution, and the lapse is laid to rest. III “The Rocking Horse Winner” ( 1926) has been grouped along with works of Lawrence that tend towards he supernatural, like “Glad Ghosts”(1926).
And indeed,”The Rocking Horse Winner” seems to ascend the realm of the fantastic. It can however be judged independent of its supernatural element. The setting is a well kept house, despite the finances in which the mother is extremely bitter about the lack of money and the impotency of the father to handle such a situation. Paul, the male older child desperately wants to be lucky to be able to please his mother and his rocking horse becomes the instrument through which he derives his luck, or through which Luck is granted him. There is also the narrowness of ideas highlighted in this story. Luck is good because luck is the harbinger of money, and Uncle Oscar can’t help contemplating on the “win” even as the nephew lies newly
dead. In this story can be seen the classic Oedipal Complex, so described by Freud, taking shape. But they remain shades and not the whole truth because a “rival” father figure is almost absent. The frenzy that Paul experiences on the Rocking Horse can be equated to sexual frenzy, in his mind filling the gaping chasm that is his mother’s dissatisfaction. Ironically, he is also in actuality filling the financial need or “greed” of his mother and hence satisfying her but of course it is never enough and he keeps hearing the whisper “ There must be more”. His frenzy can also be viewed in terms of a religious mania, a plea and a prayer, and he is in fact seeking divine intervention in the form of Luck. This reading is further complicated by the fact that Lawrence was very much against the Freudian idea of sexuality being evident from childhood itself. Lawrence firmly believed that sexuality of a child did not develop until puberty. Paul’s age is ambiguous, he could be certainly at the threshold of puberty. But his Mother obsession is apparent and his death is also a circumstance in the vain hope of bringing material satisfaction to his mother. Within the framework of an almost-absent father, the child takes charge of the house financially and has the “luck” that his father lacks. Chaman Nahal in “D.H Lawrence, An Eastern View” is of the opinion that natural flow from mother to child is perverted into an absorbing of life by the mother from the child. This is supported by the fact that the mother at first feels hostility towards her children that her children realize as well. “Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard.” Paul, sensing the distance and clamouring for her notice, tries desperately to win her attention and in the pursuit of that task ends up giving his life for his mother’s satisfaction. Death and Sexuality again become intertwined in the fatality of the tragedy, death is reduced in stature by talks of monetary gain and he dies in a moment of climax. It’s a ruthless use of the child, is transformed into the parent and takes on the burden of bringing in the “filthy lucre“.The metaphorical death of the child figure in the early part of the story can be juxtaposed against the physical death, the final act releasing him, a freedom of sorts .It is a peak reached that has to culminate in death, an end because by natural law, anything that rises to its utmost potential must necessarily decline from that peak. After the crescendo, there is descent, and in this case, sudden descent. IV Graham Hough, in The Dark Sun iterates that “the Peculiarity in Lawrence is that in every case, a claim or an attractive force, a bond exerts itself in flat opposition to the normal sentimental disposition of the characters”. He adds further that “Lawrence professed himself uninterested in character in the conventional self and it is true that many of his personages live in our minds chiefly as depersonalised representatives of certain states of mind”. This can be seen as a projection of Jungian archetypes in his short stories. All his characters do become a mode of expressing certain unconscious elements of the mind. For instance, The Prussian Officer can be seen as exemplifying the Shadow archetype. The shadow is an archetype that consists of the sex and life instincts. The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts and shortcomings. This archetype is often described as the darker side of the psyche, representing wildness and chaos. People sometimes deny this element of their own psyche and instead project it onto others. Thus the violence of the Prussian Officer may be located in his denial of his instincts. Another archetype that presents itself readily in the short stories reviewed is that of the Persona, in “Smile”. The persona represents all of the different social masks that we wear among different groups and situations. It acts to shield the ego from negative images. The mask of social realities comes undone in “Smile”, and the man finds himself smiling, nudged, as it is, by the wife who is discovered with a “faint ironical curl” herself at the end of the story. It becomes very interesting then, that one of the critics brings in the Bakhtinian theory with respect to Lawrence. According to Con Coreonos and Trudi Tate, “...the Lawrence who thus emerges is merry, subversive and carnivalesque”. They add that” Bataille’s...eroticisation of death is remarkably similar to Lawrence’s own thought. It is a way of becoming divine in the very act of acknowledging the emptiness in all things...”. R. E Pritchard, in D.H Lawrence, Body Of Darkness says that “ The underworld, conventionally associated with darkness, death and demonic spirits was also for him associated with the male being, especially the father...he sought peace in a “male womb”, the death that is serene being and power”. He goes on to say “So Lawrence saw death as ambivalent, like corruption and disintegration, all three essential for rebirth”. This theory of rebirth links up to what Chaman Nahal says of Death in Lawrence, “ Death remains for Lawrence a highly conspicuous symbol of newness.” This idea of rebirth in death is most adroitly expressed in The Rocking Horse Winner’s choice of protagonist, namely, the child. The Child in Jungian Archetype signifies rebirth, salvation, and longing for innocence. Lawrence, in “The Reality of Peace” says that “Death is understood in us, thus we transcend it. Henceforward, actual death is a fulfilling of our own knowledge...we can never destroy death, we can only envelop and contain it and then we are free” In all three cases, nowhere is death mourned in the conventional sense. There has been an undertone of release. In “The Prussian Officer”, the orderly gains freedom from the officer’s relentless persecution of him, in “Smile” she is seen not in pain, but with a smile and in “The Rocking Horse Winner”, he is finally released from his redoubtable “luck”. In A Preface to Lawrence, Gamini Salgado says “ Sexuality and unconscious play a dominant part in the thinking of both Freud and Lawrence, but they mean very different things by “unconscious”. For Freud, the unconscious is utterly selfish and ruthless in its blind desire to satisfy the Pleasure Principle. Its desires are mainly sexual and primitive and are such as the conscious moral or aesthetic sensibility would regard with abhorrence. If the psyche consisted only of the Unconscious, civilisation would have been impossible. It is completely at odds with any societal or moral impulses...For Lawrence, unconscious was a more positive element...[for Lawrence] it became the source of individuality and principle of new creativity”. For Freud, sexuality becomes the chief source of fulfilling the impulses of the unconscious, and this approach for Lawrence was problematic. He was of the opinion that psychoanalysts were responsible for the complete erosion of the moral faculty in man. Thus we see that Lawrence’s ideas on such fraught themes such as death and sexuality were rooted in a conscious movement away, yet paradoxically embedded, in the ideas of psychoanalysts and in their ideas of the unconscious. However, the merit of the short stories in producing a reaction in the audience can be discerned even without the crutches of psychoanalysis. He deals with taboos and questions those that shirk from primal impulses blatantly, coercing us to come out of our preconceived notions of “decent” sexuality and acceptable behaviour at deaths. A realist, his short stories tell the glaring truth even within a supernatural setting. For reality does not function in the comfortable haunts of the privileged sane, the naked truth, it lurks in the disturbed minds of the insane and ironically, those most close to their unconscious selves. Works Cited Stevens, Hugh. “Sex and the Nation: ‘The Prussian Officer’ and Women in Love”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
Coreonos, Con and Tate, Trudi. “Lawrence’s Tales”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
Milne, Drew.” Lawrence and the politics of sexual politics”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
Becket, Fiona. “ Lawrence and psychoanalysis”. The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001 Bibliography
Books :
1.The Cambridge Companion to D.H Lawrence. Anna Fernihough. Cambridge University Press,2001
2. The Complete Short Stories of D.H Lawrence Vol II. 1955
3. The Complete Short Stories of D.H Lawrence Vol III. 1955
4. D.H Lawrence, An Eastern View. Chaman Nahal .1971
5. D.H Lawrence, Body Of Darkness. R.E Pritchard.1971
6. The Visual Imagination of D.H. Lawrence. Keith Alldritt. 1971
7.The Dark Sun. Graham Hough.
8. A Preface To Lawrence. Gamini Salgado
Online Websites :
1. Wikipedia.org
2. JSTOR.ORG
3. Sparknotes.com
4. Scribd
5. Nlist
6. About.com
7. DHLawrence.org
8. The New York Times
9. Abebooks.co.uk
10. Goodreads
Online Articles :
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes
2. http://ia600307.us.archive.org/4/items/psychoanalysisan032594mbp/psychoanalysisan032594mbp.pdf
3. http://psychology.about.com/od/personalitydevelopment/tp/archetypes.htm
4. JSTOR Sewanee Review : The literary Criticism of D.H Lawrence by Rene Wellek
5. Derek Hawthorne on “DH Lawrence on the Unconscious “. Counter-currents.com
6. “The Reality Of Peace” by DH Lawrence
7. “Fantasia and the Unconscious” by DH Lawrence